Love in the Wild: A Tarzan Retelling

by Emma Castle

  One truth that always came back to him, no matter how much it hurt him to think about it, was that he had not always been a gorilla. Once, long ago, he had been something, someone else.

  Thorne touched the surface of the water, creating ripples that distorted his image in the pool. A quivering took hold of him as for the first time in his young life he accepted that he was truly not like his family.

  G. Gorilla . . . A soft voice spoke to him through the mists of time. The forest around him almost seemed to hum in response.

  He knew that he was something else. But what? Thorne’s heart grew heavy with shame at not being Akika’s true brother, but there was a glimmer of curiosity that defined his species—though he did not yet know he belonged to that species.

  Thorne stared at the surface of the water.

  If he was not a gorilla, then perhaps he could swim the way he’d seen the leopards do when they crossed rivers and lakes. They moved slowly, sleekly through the water, pawing their front legs in forward circular motions and kicking with their back legs. Thorne was not as big or as heavy as his kin, so perhaps he could do the same? He’d noticed he had a different mobility in his body, so it was entirely possible that he was capable of swimming. There was only one way to find out.

  He flung himself recklessly into the pool. Keza’s scream of terror was muted as Thorne sank beneath the surface. He opened his eyes, seeing the murky depths of the watery world around him. His bare feet touched the bottom of the pool. He coiled himself tight and pushed up until he surged into the light and gasped sweet air. He moved his arms, testing their effectiveness, and soon he was pulling himself toward the shore, where his mother was pacing and wailing in panic.

  Thorne, a little weary after such a new activity, crawled out of the water, breathing deeply. Keza rushed to him, balled a fist, and thumped his side with one hand, her touch gentle even as she reprimanded his behavior. Then she grasped his head and pulled him around, looking him over for injury.

  He hooted in reassurance at his mother and grasped her large solid hands with his own, holding them to his skin. Gorillas thrived on physical touch, they lived for contact with one another, and Thorne was no different. He craved his mother’s brushing caresses over his hair and the light thumps of her loosely balled fist against his chest in greeting.

  He glanced back once more at the pool, and a deep longing for more answers and more truths filled him. But he would have to return when his mother was not there to fuss over him.

  The band finished drinking and worked their way into a group of fruit trees to eat their evening meal and rest. Thorne climbed the nearest mango tree; he alone among his family was still the most comfortable at such an activity. Once gorillas aged, they stayed closer to the ground.

  Thorne plucked some ripe-smelling fruit from a tree and tossed them down to the gorillas below, where they divided the food. But he did not join them. He clutched a pair of mangoes in his hand and climbed higher in a hagenia tree until he leaned against the thin branches that formed the canopy. He pushed his head through the spreading branches and looked out over the tops of the forest that stretched for hundreds of miles around. Above him the sky was inky black, with a vibrant spread of glittering stars.

  Stars . . . He knew what they were. Well, not exactly, but he knew the word. Stars. The word felt different on his tongue. It was not from the language of the birds, the leopards, or the gorillas. It was a language that was softer, clearer, yet just as beautiful as the languages he spoke now with love in his heart. The word stars remained inside him like a well-kept secret, spreading a warmth he could not explain as he ate his fruit and gazed upon the expanse far above him. There were feelings, not quite memories, that churned within him, calling in soft whispers.

  Remember who you are. Remember . . .

  Thousands of miles away

  Cameron Haywood stood at the window of his study in Somerset Hall, the ancestral home of the earldom of Somerset in England. He held a glass of scotch and gazed upon the same stars, though muted somewhat by the distant city lights.

  Thirteen years. Had it really been that long since his older brother, Jacob, had been lost in the Ugandan forest with his wife and child? It felt like a lifetime ago. He had never wanted to become the Earl of Somerset. He would give everything to have his family back.

  Thirteen years ago, he had done all that he could to find his brother. He had sent search parties, tried to locate the plane, and bribed every official for any information. He’d flown there a dozen times, scouring the impenetrable forest, even calling the names of his loved ones until he lost his voice.

  Cameron went to his desk, turning his back to the stars. The sounds of a party going on in his house downstairs gave him no joy at the prospect of mingling among the powerful men and women of England. Today would have been his nephew’s sixteenth birthday.

  “Cameron.” His wife, Isabelle, stuck her head into his office. “Our guests are waiting. Duty calls, I’m afraid. Lofty is entertaining everyone with tales, but you know he can’t do that forever. Well, he can, actually, but we shouldn’t let him.” Isabelle almost smiled. Jordie Lofthouse had been the only one who could make Cameron or Isabelle smile in all these years.

  “I’m coming, darling,” he sighed. He touched the faces of Jacob, Amelia, and little Thorne in a framed photo on his desk before he went out to meet his wife.

  “You look pale,” Isabelle murmured in concern. She looked up at him with those lovely gray eyes of hers, eyes that had bewitched him long before Jacob’s death. Isabelle had married him before he knew his life would change forever. She hadn’t wanted their sudden change in circumstances any more than he had. They’d both wanted to be free, to live a life without the constraints of the titles that had been thrust upon them.

  “It’s Thorne’s birthday today. He would have been sixteen.” Cameron rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. Isabelle brushed his dark hair back from his face with her fingers.

  “I know. I remembered this morning. Why don’t I send everyone away and we can have a quiet night together by the fire?”

  He almost chuckled. “Banish the peers of the realm from the halls of Somerset? As tempting as it sounds, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” He pressed a kiss to her temple. “I shall just put on a brave face and get on with the night. It won’t be the first time.”

  Cameron and his wife descended the grand staircase into the waiting crowd below with diplomatic smiles. But his heart, at least part of it, still searched for answers in the dark heart of the jungle in Africa.

  Four years later

  Thorne heard the creatures long before he saw them. Three animals stumbling through the underbrush of the forest. Their disregard for leaving evidence of their passage left an easy trail to follow. The sounds they made, a unique mix of complex utterances, were musical, like birdsong rather than the deep vocal chorus-like language of the gorillas.

  Curious, he crept along the massive stretching branches of the trees above these creatures as he sought a clearer look. They continued to vocalize in their nonsense language as they stopped and sat down at the base of the trees.

  He slid lower, using thick vines to support his body as he tried to see their faces. They wore strange animal skins, very different from the kob deer pelt that covered Thorne’s vulnerable parts.

  His gorilla family wore no such skins. Their bodies were more compact, and their posture lent them far more natural protection. Thorne felt exposed and vulnerable, so after killing his first deer, he began to wear animal skins as a way to protect himself. He wasn’t quite sure how he’d come by the idea—except perhaps to say he’d dreamed it. Visions of animals like him wearing gleaming pieces of something on their necks and arms. They’d showed him in wild, quick flashes in these dreams how to hunt deer, how to use the shale rocks to skin them. He’d been ashamed to hunt in front of the gorillas, who did not eat deer, so he had gone much deeper into the forest to hunt.

  He’d refined his techniqu
e now to have a dried bit of leather from the deer with which to fashion himself a way to tie the pelt tight around his waist without worry of it falling off while he swung from vines and climbed.

  The creatures he stalked now were almost fully covered in such skins.

  One of the creatures removed a covering from his head, and Thorne’s mouth parted in shock. These animals were like him, yet not. Their skin was dark, like the rich bark of a mahogany tree and just like the creatures in his dreams who’d taught him how to survive. Their hands and limbs were not formed like the gorillas’. They were exactly like Thorne’s. For the first time in seventeen years, he was staring at a face like his own.

  “Gorilla.”

  The word was the only one that he recognized in the stream of sounds pouring from their lips as they spoke to one another.

  A sudden, painful flash of memory, an image of a gorilla upon wood. No, not wood—paper.

  A face like his gazed down at him, a female with a bright smile and golden hair . . . smiles . . . How had he forgotten what a smile was?

  His lips curved into a grin, and he huffed excitedly until he saw one of the creatures lift a long brown stick, pointing it at a small monkey perched on a tree branch not far from Thorne.

  The creature held the stick close to his face, and there was a violent bang! Thorne was so startled that he lost his grip on the vines and plummeted to the forest floor. He landed catlike on the ground, not ten feet from the creatures. One of them screamed and pointed at him. The male who held the loud stick turned it on Thorne, hollering. There was another deafening bang!

  Pain knifed through Thorne’s arm, and he howled with rage as he stood to his full height. He curled his fists and beat savagely on his chest, bearing his teeth as he’d seen Sunya do a thousand times before. The creatures shouted back, but fear widened their eyes and they scrambled away. In their haste to flee, one tripped, his head hitting the base of a knotted tree as the others left him behind.

  Thorne stopped a short distance from the body and crouched, studying him. The creature had different feet than him, and his face held no hair along his jaw and mouth like Thorne. He reached out, his fingers touching the male’s face. His skin appeared smooth, but beneath his fingertips, Thorne felt the bristle of hair, much like his had felt when he’d been younger. Despite his size, perhaps he was not yet grown?

  Suddenly the male’s eyes snapped open, and he stared in horror at Thorne.

  “Gorilla.” Thorne repeated the word, finding it easier to say than he expected. He tapped his own chest and repeated. “Gorilla.”

  “What?” the man said. “No. Not gorilla.”

  Not. That word Thorne recognized too.

  The male looked him over, as amazed by Thorne as Thorne was by him. Eventually he nodded and tapped his chest.

  “Human,” the male said. “Man.”

  Thorne stared at him, bewildered as the tongue that he had been born to speak came back to him in hazy flashes.

  “Boy,” he said.

  B is for boy. You’re a boy, Thorne. A female’s face flashed in his mind, the woman he’d glimpsed in his mind with sunlight-gold hair who smiled.

  “G is for gorilla.” Thorne whispered the words, his voice rasping. He had not used his vocal cords like this in years. It almost hurt to speak.

  “You speak English?”

  “Ing-leesh?” Thorne murmured the familiar word.

  “Yes, English,” the male said with excitement, smiling.

  “Yes,” Thorne echoed. He pressed his calloused palm on the man’s chest, their eyes locked on each other. Around them the jungle murmured softly, and Thorne smiled as he looked at the man.

  “Friend?” Thorne asked. There was something about the man’s face, a kindness and quick intelligence in his eyes that made Thorne trust him.

  The man nodded, now solemn. “Friend.”

  3

  Uganda—Present Day

  Eden Matthews grinned at the people nearest her as she got in line with a small group of visitors at Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park. For $600 and a park entry fee, she was about to have the experience of a lifetime, hiking her way deep into the mountainous terrain of the jungle to see the mountain gorillas.

  At twenty-four, she was one of the youngest photographers to have made the journey for National Park magazine. For as long as she could remember, she’d been obsessed with conservation. Her parents had taken her to zoos and aquariums when she was a child, and seeing those animals, knowing their natural habitats were being destroyed, had changed her life.

  She swung her camera bag over her shoulder and tightened the elastic hair tie holding her blonde hair out of her face. She had been warned more than once about the humidity and the steepness of the climb she was about to make, but it would all be worth it.

  “Everyone, stay close, please,” one of the guides called out. “We are going to start the hike now. Stay in pairs if you can, and please watch the forest floor. Beauty may be above you, but danger will be below you.”

  “Goodness, that sounds ominous, doesn’t it, Harold?” one of the older women asked her husband.

  “He’s probably talking about snakes, Mags.” Harold put an arm around his wife’s shoulders. “They have those snakes here that if they bite you, you can take ten steps before you keel over dead.”

  Mags whipped her head up to look at him in shock.

  Eden bit her lip, trying not to laugh. It was clear Harold was teasing, but his wife seemed too anxious to realize that.

  “We’ll be fine,” Eden told her. “Just watch where you walk. I’m Eden Matthews.”

  “Maggie Fitzpatrick. This is my husband, Harold. Are you from the States?”

  Eden smiled. “From Arkansas. You?”

  “Phoenix.” Maggie plucked at her soaked tank top. “I’m used to the heat, but not so much the humidity.”

  “Arkansas is humid, but nothing like this.” Eden pulled out a cute bright-red elastic headband and slid it on the top part of her forehead to catch sweat.

  “Follow me,” the guide at the front called out. The second guide fell in behind the line of tourists as they started into the jungle.

  As Eden and the others began their trek, a light rain began to fall. Her hair and clothes were soon soaked despite her rain slicker because of the humidity and sweat. She wore a long-sleeved T-shirt and hiking shorts and boots with tall socks past her ankles to protect her legs. The smell of bug spray and sweat seemed to follow them wherever they went. The light rain turned into a heavy downpour only a few minutes later.

  “Welcome to the jungle!” one of the younger men ahead called back. Everyone laughed, and the tense excitement of the moment eased a bit.

  “What made you come here, honey?” Maggie asked as they kept pace with each other. Harold was ahead of them, carefully pushing aside branches for them.

  “I’m a photojournalist for National Park magazine.” She paused, thinking over the real answer. “But honestly, I am just passionate about the jungle and conservation. Gorillas have been one of my favorite animals since I was a kid.”

  It was hard to put into words what it was that Africa made her feel. The dark jungles, the sun-streaked savannas, and the majesty of a continent that refused to yield to human civilization. It called to something ancient inside Eden. Uganda was called the Pearl of Africa because of its lush jungles, which sheltered the wild gorilla population. The habitat was so ancient it had survived the last ice age intact, while the other forests of Africa had perished.

  Their path toward the mountains continued, steep and slippery. Eden had been warned that finding the gorillas could take anywhere from thirty minutes to five hours. The jungle thickened after the second hour, forcing everyone to resume their single-file marching order. The guides and gorilla trackers cleared the path ahead as best they could with machetes. The higher they climbed, the heavier Eden’s breathing became, and her thighs grew tight and strained. She turned to hold out a hand to Maggie and Harold on the ro
ugher parts of the ascent.

  “Jesus, the kids won’t believe we did this,” Harold laughed, catching his breath.

  Eden gripped Harold’s palm as he hoisted himself past a steep branch. “You have kids?”

  “A son and a daughter. Both in their thirties. They bought us this trip since they knew Mags liked that Dian Fossey book, Gorillas in the Mist.”

  “I love that book too.” Eden’s heart twinged when she thought of the conservationist Dian Fossey, who had been brutally murdered in the mountains. Wherever there were people determined to save something, it seemed there were even more ready to kill or destroy it for a profit.

  The plant life around the tourists changed along with the elevation. Bamboo shot up in thick, towering stalks all around them, forcing them to squeeze between the tall stems. After another hour, the forest changed around them again. They entered the Hagenia Zone, named for the spectacular moss-covered trees that gave the jungle an enchanted feel. An ancient magic seemed to hang in the air, mixing with the wild birds’ chorusing. The branches above them were thicker than her body and stretched twenty or thirty feet on either side. It was easy to see how monkeys could jump between the trees here.

  The rain suddenly stopped, yet you wouldn’t know it from the way the water continued to drip off the trees around them, the waxy emerald leaves of the plant life gleaming in the intermittent shafts of light slicing through the canopy. Eden and the others removed their rain slickers. She crushed hers into a ball and stuffed it back into its pouch before tucking it into her backpack.

  The strong smell of damp and decaying vegetation overpowered her senses, masking the other aromas. Misty clouds hung low around the distant peaks and filled the valleys between the mountains ahead. Mist poured down toward their group, making the ground almost invisible. Eden tripped over a large root, but she caught herself and continued on. Maggie tripped behind her in the exact same spot, cursing the root as Harold helped her up.